How Do You Help the Public Understand Health Care Reform?

Drawing on many disciplines, from nursing to insurance, this dictionary of public health terminology defines 2000 terms.

Public Education

Our basic • premise for this project:
For democratic public policy change, citizens must understand the terms of the debate.

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PR Challenge:Our mandate is to enhance broad public understanding of the American healthcare system in the early days of the health reform debate. However, many citizens don’t understand the fine print on their own health insurance policies, let alone the terms of America’s national health policy dialogue.

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Our Strategy:We focus on basics: language. Our project is to translate the concepts and terminology of the health care system into lay language, hoping to make the public policy debate more accessible to concerned citizens.

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Our Success Story:
We research and write an eclectic, interdisciplinary public health dictionary that defines 2,000 health policy terms. A major commercial publisher with strong distribution channels publishes thousands of copies of the book, entitled “HealthSpeak.” Activists and educators use it to inform the public policy debate.